Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll assembled their staff for a Champagne toast to mass death on the commencement of hostilities against Iraq. Stoll called it "my war." CNN maintains a running update here of Americans killed in Ira's war.

On February 6, 2003, Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll wrote, in all seriousness, of a pending anti-war demonstration that the "the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution."

The June 9, 1995 Wall Street Journal quoted an SEC complaint against New York Sun backer Bruce Kovner as saying Kovner had "altered and destroyed" subpoenaed evidence. We wish you'd do the same to the daily print run of your God-awful newspaper, Bruce.

Also, Professor G. Harlan Reynolds alleged on August 27, 2002 - when the Sun was several months in publication - that Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll had not yet paid him for a piece authored for their inaugural issue.

Lots of fun in the Sun today. Where to begin. . .In SmarterTimes, we get a glimpse of where SethAndIra’s animosity towards the Times may come from. They whine about the Times Company’s acquisition of the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. We have noted before that these two dyed in the wool “New Yorkers” are, in fact, from the Bay State; it now becomes obvious that there is something personal in their dislike for an actual New York paper, and perhaps part of the rationale for starting the Sun was to give all New York papers a bad name. (It is also worth noting that the Anemic Duo seem to have taken their home state’s motto to heart, or at least the first half.)

On the front page, Anna Schneider-Mayerson must be (certainly not for the first time) lamenting the lack of trained editors at the Sun. Her article on the upcoming second annual TriBeCa Film Festival notes that for the first edition of the fest, “Organizers sold 30,00 tickets”. An impressive figure.

And finally, the front page features the following headline: “Treasure Hunt: Searching for the All-Time Perfect Bath”. Why Lauren Mechling covers this story, rather than Rachel Donadio, is confusing: thanks to those of us at LFLS, Rachel is already familiar with the story’s subject, as well as searches for perfection, something she will certainly never achieve with her current employer.

Seth Lipsky, the newsroom chickenhawk (in the original sense of the term), today harvests the fruits of all those long hours spent hanging around the Port Authority with a stack of banknotes propositioning arriving young wannabe jornos from the provinces. He's assigned poor Jennifer Fishbein to write about an all but exhausted source of fuel for the tinfoil hat crowd's fires. A not bad piece by Ms. Fishbein, though she'll have to work more Ahmad Chalabi angles to her stories if she wants to be featured on the Sun's website with any regularity.

Ira, meanwhile, is writing about some talk radio dipshit whose book was taken apart by leftist critics even before it was published properly. The only reason someone on the right would bother to engage such an obnoxious a-hole in print would be to guard onesself against the charge of being an obnoxious a-hole, which for Stoll is now a necessity. As a connoiseur of ineptitude, I've never listened to Michael Savage, the successful and syndicated radio personality in question. I confine myself to SethAndIra's nifty little paper. If Savage is gleefully reproducing rebarbative racist stereotypes and urging the government to prosecute the exercise of Constitutional rights as treasonous, I wouldn't know. Ira though does so with regularity, and it's all but a tactical imperative for the idiot son to deflect some of the abuse so deservedly coming his way.

Seth Lipsky delivers to the Sun faithful his updated catechism today. In "Coastal Confusion," The Talentless Mr. Lipsky reprints a few of the "sincere but misguided beliefs" he was exposed to on escaping his pen, responding with a few of his own. Unfortunately for Seth, few of his contras hold water, and none of them hold sense. Specious at best, spurious at worst, he fails his catechumens singularly, sputtering idiocies such as follow:

Well, what about North Korea?

We’re all for helping to free [the preferred Sun euphemism for "bombing the piss out of"] North Korea.

You want to get us into a world war?

We’re already in a world war. The question is whether the good guys are going to win, and how soon.

Most laughable is Lipsky's defense of his precious war in Indochina, where he suggests that America's failure to drop even more bombs on premodern villagers lead directly to today's dreadful state of affairs in Vietnam where the government “prohibits independent political, labor, and social organizations; such organizations exist only under government control.” Never mind that SethAndIra would love to see the disappearance of most left-of-center labor and social organizations, and that Ira, in "Comfort and the Protesters," recently offered the world his fraction of a thought on the need to prosecute independent political speech as treason, as well as his approval of the government's successful control of same.

Back in Pawnee, Brad Olson and I are digging ourselves out from the blizzard of reader mail inflicted upon us. We reprint some here without comment:

Your defense of free speech is admirable. I wonder if your passionate devotion to this principle would lead you to defend the rights of people who lose their jobs or are expelled from universities because they violate politically correct dogma. One example is the student who was expelled from the University of Pennsylvania several years ago for shouting an insult at a group of African Ameicans. I'm sure you, like most liberals, would be inconsistent on this point. I loved your defense of Iraq. You attempted to portray the opinion of an entire country and its government by quoting two private citizens. At this rate, you'll be conducting polls for The New York Times, CNN, and yes, The L.A. Times, very soon.

...

I would like to throw out this perplexing piece of the treason puzzle.

Grover Norquist, famous tax-cut enthusiast and patron saint of the right, has apparently been taking some guff from others on the far-right for his association with Islamic groups, such as CAIR, that have expressed pro-terrorist sympathies. As we all know from having read SethAndIra's numerous, dogmatic editorials on the subject, CAIR's former counsel has been appointed to the Human Rights Commission in New York, and this proves that Bloomberg is a communist, terrorist, traitor, whatever.

But what or Mr. Norquist? Of course, it would be heresy to suggest that a taxcutter (read: policy bitch to the rich -- see: Manhattan Institute) could be in league with terrorists. But St. Grover has actually gotten CAIR and other pro-Hezbollah groups audiences in the White House. Surely this is treason!

Or, to use Stollogic (formerly known as "illogic"), anyone who associates with Mr. Norquist or his ideas is, in Sethandiranistan, in league with the terrorists. This group includes Messrs. Stoll and Lipsky. They are fellow-travelers to Grover and his terrorist-loving anti-tax platform.

I guess the NYPD could do worse, in the end, than to send to witnesses to seth's office and to ira's office, to preserve at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution.

...

With regard to the editorial in the New York Sun, "Comfort and the Protesters" (6 February 2003):

Actually, right-wing extremists like the editors of the New York Sun have given aid and comfort to Saddam for years: supporting him before the Gulf War and after. After the Gulf War, they were complicit in waging the most comprehensive siege warfare in human history, which: 1) ENSURED Saddam's tenure (keeping the Iraqi people too weak and dependent to overthrow him), and 2) brought themselves to precisely the same moral level as Saddam by supporting, for more than a decade, the abysmal failure of global economic sanctions, which only served to massively harm the Iraqi people (to the tune of more than a million excess deaths, including more than 500,000 children under 5-years of age). It take two to dance the Siege Warfare Tango, and the editors of the New York Sun did the Death Dance for a decade plus.

Now, the editors of the New York Sun advocate completing the shredding of the U.S. Constitution (what is left after John Ashcroft's assault). They project their own complicity in supporting Saddam's tenure onto Americans exercising their first amendment rights to oppose war against Iraq, making the ridiculous and pathetic claim that this PATRIOTIC exercise of the first amendment gives aid and comfort to Saddam. In reality, the great majority of participants in the 15 February rallies worldwide are fully cognizant of the monstrousness of Saddam AND the sociopaths who have danced with Saddam in the last decade. The repeated attempts by these sociopaths to spin and claim the moral high ground with regard to Saddam represents the worst sort of moral relativism.

The editors of the New York Sun don't really care about democracy or human rights in Iraq. This war is also not really about "weapons of mass destruction". This war is about geopolitical control of oil and deflecting attention from massive domestic problems in the United States.

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So you are not considering a comments section, eh? You'll be missing half the fun if you don't do it. Receiving "poorly punctuated rage and vituperation" can be highly satisfying. But don't take my word for it. You can learn from the Master himself!